Here is the third installment of Outfoscions about which I was talking. After the first two technology ones, I am presenting you, next very tasty one called Potluck. Yes, the venture is called potluck and its an exclusive north Indian restaurant in Bangalore, started by B K Birla. Here I present small interview I did with Birla who is CFO, Chief Food Officer at Potluck. Thanks for the time Birla.

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[thej] How and when did you get this idea of opening a restaurant?
[Birla] I have been enthusiastic cook from an early age. In typical North Indian households, cooking is a necessary skill for girls and almost a taboo for boys. But in our family I have always seen my father and brother cooking good food and leo technoloarning cooking came naturally. After I came to Bangalore in 1995 I setup my kitchen within 2 weeks and cooking everyday became a natural habit for me. In fact the deal I had with my roommate was that I will do the cooking and he will wash utensils. Besides all this I always had 10-15 friends at my place on weekends and cooking for all of them was a very regular affair for me and I enjoyed cooking for all. Similar things continued during my Infosys onsite trips and it was always fun to cook for everyone.
Opening a restaurant was always on my agenda but while working at Amazon I came across a soft skill trainer who also runs a South Indian restaurant called Krishna Cafe. It was an inspiration for me and my friends at Amazon and that is the point where we started to think seriously about this venture.
On a lighter note if you have fed free food to too many people, you want to make up at some point J

[thej]How is it different from running a software project, I had to ask this?
[Birla] There are both similarities and differences in running a software venture and restaurant. The similarity is in terms of people and their aspirations. A BTech graduate coming from IITs and aspiring to learn new skills has very similar mindset to an uneducated waiter coming with pretty much nothing from places like Darjeeling and trying to become a captain (guy who takes orders in restaurants).
One of the main differences I see is in terms of the cycle times in creating a product and getting feedback from customers about it. In food business the cycle is compressed and the feedback is pretty much in your face. The other big difference I find is that in software or other white collar jobs we get used to a very polished language and environment. In food business or probably other brick and mortar businesses you come across all types of people.
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Second in our Outfoscions series is a travel search product which is easy and humane to use. Yes, you don’t have to fill to and from places, date, time textboxes. All you have is one single search box and ask it the way you ask your friend. For example Jammu to Knyakumari next monday gives my favorite Himsagar Express as first option and then the rest. 90di is found by three outfoscions Kiran, Abhinit and Naqvi. They surely have an interesting search engine in crowded market. As of now their concentration is on finding the best traveling option and guiding the traveller to the respective site. Which I think is very interesting considering most of the other travel portals allow you to book the tickets on their own site.
Here is an interview of them and thanks to Abhinit for taking time out to answer my questions.

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[Thej]. How and when did you think about becoming entrepreneurs, was giving up a decent job difficult?
[Abhinit]While each one of us, would have a slightly different personal story here, but broadly we wanted to try doing something different and something of our own and so in May 2007 we took the plunge. Leaving the job certainly not easy but once we made up our mind it was not that difficult. Read the rest of this entry »

As promised I am starting the outfoscions series with Onze Technologies. With their first and primary product Latlong.in they are trying to decode the maps for the rest of us. Latlong tries to give you the information on the go, hence the best way is to deliver by SMS. But the biggest problem for delivering the route on the SMS is 160 character limit. Guys at Latlong came up with a plan of decoding the last ~5km route to destination. This is a brilliant idea considering most of the time users struggle in last five kilometers. Any detailed information from a known landmark in last five kilometers is the way we generally give directions to our friend. LatLong tries to do the same on sms.
You can start using by sending “help” to 90088 90088.
This Sunday I met them at their office. In fact I used their own service to reach their office. It was great fun talking to all the four (Sud, Rahul, Sairam and Pavaman) founders.
Here is an interview I did with them. I am not an interviewer as such. But I have tried to ask questions, which probably will help you know more about LatLong.in. Thank you Sud for taking time out.
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This is a small project where I am planning to interview series of people who were Infoscions once. They are usually called Outfoscions inside. This series mostly covers those people who spent their significant time at Infosys and then exited to do something big.

I personally know many but there could be many more, who would have left Infy before I joined Infosys. So I need your help to get in touch with them. Help and expect a great Outfoscion every week starting this monday.

Please use the form below to suggest an Outfoscion.

All of us at one time or the other written bad code. Now we cant go back and correct it, but we can offset it by buying “The Bad Code Offset“, just like how big companies buy “carbon offset”.

The money spent on buying “The Bad Code Offset” is sent to these five great open source projects, JQuery, Apache, PostgreSQL, Drupal and BSD.

Even though I think all big IT companies should buy some really large credits there, I don’t think its practical :) But personally I am behind lots of bad code

Every time I see my old code, I feel I could have done better. Is it normal for any developer? #

I am planning to become patron member next month (My this month’s budget for donation has been used. Also that I am trying live frugal, I can’t cross my monthly planned budget, so will wait till next month. Any wayWikipedia still needs your help). Go ahead become a patron member.
Two big developer community sites StackOverFlow and DailyWTF are supporting and sponsoring them. So its genuine.

“The Bad Code Offset provides a convenient and rational approach for balancing out the bad code we all have created at one time or another throughout our lifetime—even when we can’t go back and fix it directly.

Denominated in Source Lines of Code (SLOC), every purchase will offset the desired quantity of SLOC and pave the way toward future code excellence. [1 SLOC]

Money raised through the purchase of Bad Code Offsets supports the various Open Source Initiatives that are performing vital work towards the salvation of our future code base.

Every purchase of an offset today will take us one line of code closer to our goal of universal code excellence. Banish the bugs in your past as you help usher in a new age of software development.”

Ref:
1. StackOverFlow Blog
2. TheDailyWTF article